Yes, copyright requires a human - in much the same way that an LLM requires a prompt. There's a continuum of author involvement that has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
It's worth noting in your case that no determination of copyright was actually made by a court (well, almost: a court ruled that the monkey definitely didn't have copyright and that even if it did they wouldn't make PETA its guardian).
Some opinions were issued but those are non-binding and eventually the photographer gave up because litigating copyright is expensive.